A story of friendship: An homage to Peter Beilharz

I love reading autobiographies and memoirs. Reading them has taught me much about the lives of others but also about myself. ¹ Some autobiographies have allowed me to explore the many different ways in which people find themselves through reflexively writing. Becoming a person means gathering our experiences and memories, tied together with projects of ourselves. This is not a teleological trajectory; we do not know how our path will end and when. Quite the contrary: proceeding from the start leads one into ordering what initially looks like chaos. The autobiographical process is one of learning while discovering, retrieving, and most of all, creating something that can be called a life document of self-presentation. Critically reassessing our experiences while writing about them forces us to engage with others, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1953) once did in his Confessions. If the experiment of writing about oneself is successful, it happens like an epiphany: it reveals something new to even the writer. Consequently, this kind of work is not only an intellectual journey but also, most of all, a moral reckoning.

This reflection is tied up with the memoir written by my dear friend Peter Beilharz (2020), Intimacy in Postmodern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman. Indeed, Peter’s process of understanding himself not only allows us to learn about him as a person and as an intellectual, but it also explores some important dimensions of his sociological thinking in connection with his friend. This connection serves as a territory for creating frames of understanding and interpretative creation. Yet, like Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical work, Peter’s book does not stop at that. His friends from all over the world make an appearance, as do his mentors and teachers and his intellectual group in Australia, and he highlights the importance of Thesis Eleven as a journal first and as the ‘agora’ it now is. ² Reading his memoir took me back to my first great experience with autobiographical discoveries when I read De Beauvoir’s (1963) Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, the first volume in her four-volume autobiography. After finishing it, I was convinced that I wanted to be a philosopher. Her experiential material allowed me to begin learning about myself because of what Hartmut Rosa (2019: 64) has called resonance: ‘The resonant relationships established via the voice, moreover, turn out to extend between body and “soul” on the one hand, and between subject and world, on the other, and in both instances physical and symbolic resonances are mutually interactive.’ Peter’s long friendship with the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman reminds me of De Beauvoir’s great friendship with Zaza (a childhood friend from school) but also with Jean-Paul Sartre. Both are well combined in Peter’s friend Bauman. Peter’s own resonances to Bauman’s figure as an intellectual and a man allowed him to change his entire relationship to the world, to others he met along the way, and to his family and loved ones.

Peter’s self-presentation begins with a trip to England in 1992, when he met Bauman for the first time, therein starting Peter’s own journey to Ithaca. Like De Beauvoir, Peter narrates his mental trip through the changes he underwent, along with his views about sociology, and describes his commitment to one of the most extraordinary projects he led, a journal rightly called Thesis Eleven. ³ The story of the journal deserves a separate, dedicated article, or a return to the 100th issue of 2010 (Steinmetz, 2010). The journal is woven throughout Peter’s memoir as an intellectual thread, from the very beginning when he starts his travels around the world and first meets Cornelius Castoriadis, whose journal Socialisme ou Barbarie had already made an impact on Peter’s intellectual interests. Peter likely thought that Thesis Eleven would have similar interests, profoundly embedded with the experiences of Marxism and the critique that came after the failed political experiments of socialism. Peter did not understand this critique as the refusal of socialism’s meaning but as a reappraisal of it, which he describes again through his own reading of Bauman’s work:

Bauman knows Marxism as a rich combination of cultures, and this is one reason why he does not walk away from it after the fall of the Wall, or as he grows older; for if you leave it behind, it will follow you, like a shadow or a stray. As I will argue later, the work of rethinking shifts on to the plane of the modern, so that Bauman’s is the most interesting of postmodernists as post-Marxists. Bauman is especially well placed among postmoderns in that he does not begin conceptually from an economistic reduction of society or modernity. Yet economy never disappears from his analysis either, and nor does suffering. (Beilharz, 1998: 27)

This is an extraordinary and contemporary way of recovering Marx through Bauman, as other thinkers such as Nancy Fraser (2022) are already claiming we should not read Marx just as an economist but in a broader and non-economist way that does not dissolve economy through culture or the other way around.

Peter shared his views about sociology with his friend, in a way similar to De Beauvoir’s relationship to Sartre. Peter’s stature is no less than that of the person he most admired – quite the contrary, Peter’s real appraisal of Bauman’s achievements and critical perspective make his sociology as compelling, if not more so, as Bauman’s. Michael Walzer (2002) has said something of this nature while considering the role of critique in De Beauvoir’s oeuvre. ⁴

Peter’s retirement from academia, which coincides with the writing of his memoir, is tied up with the loss of his friend and the description of his last job at Sichuan University. Over the years, their relationship, founded on a rich combination of sociological mappings, conceptual thematization, and personal memories, had coalesced into love between the two friends. In his autobiography, Peter also reflects on his engagements with other famous sociologists, sharing several adventures and academic discoveries. Indeed, as he writes, he explains that ‘writing is a process of learning’ (Beilharz, 2020: 2), and both are essential for understanding. He uses his retirement as his last chance to publicly say goodbye to Bauman, similar to De Beauvoir’s (1985) book Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Peter attempted to publicly ritualize this farewell, but I doubt very much that Bauman’s presence in his mind will ever fade. Peter will remain forever at his friend’s side, where he was during much of the life they shared together.

In this autobiography, we discover that Peter’s involvement with Bauman’s sociology is much more than their shared interests in photography, authors, films, and European critical theory versus American sociology. Peter first reflects on experiences about modernity, mixed with surprising encounters with various well-known people throughout each stage of his life, some of whom shaped his views. Peter captures his friend’s rising career and the creative stage when Bauman starts coining terms that will last forever, such as liquid modernity, which describes the permanently changing, ever-plastic nature of modern life. To interpret the transformation over time from postmodernity into liquid modernity, Peter asks his readers, ‘What is the project of Zygmunt Bauman?’ Then, he answers:

Many things. As his interpreter, among others, I have sought to characterize it variously as a critique of modernity, as a critique of order, as a Weberian kind of Marxism, an East European critical theory, as a sociology of surplus populations, and so on. […] Modernity is excess; socialism was excessive, especially in its giganticist, Faustian ambitions, rebuilding the world of nature as well as the social; capitalism is excessive in its gargantuan appetite for labour, for endless growth, for sales, for exploitation in its protean drive to consume, to consume us and the planet as we consume it and especially those less fortunate than us, at home and afar. The critique of excess is a critique of waste, of human waste, of wasted lives. (Beilharz, 2020: 54)

The book also pushes back against simplifications of what sociology is for both. Peter, along with his friend, rejected that sociology could be the task of legislators (Beilharz, 2020), for sociology is a kind of hermeneutics. While Bauman’s work addressed Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work, Peter also taught courses on this German founder of contemporary hermeneutics. Peter and Bauman both defined themselves as interpreters, as critical theorists. Peter judged some better than others, but he made it very clear that sociological interpretation was about finding the meaning and conceptualizing the changes that they were both exploring through capitalism, violence, neoliberal subjects, and the horrible transformation of educational institutions as proof that things have deteriorated. Both Peter and Bauman described the ills and the liquid-changing, fast-moving features of our society. It was not an easy task, nor ever final. Through their reflective and written comradeship, by uniting and exchanging views, both of them aimed to enhance their critical writing. Their conversations not only served to build up a critical sociology, but also to cement a deeper friendship, crystallized in so many books they individually wrote. That is their shared legacy, and Peter is proud of this common achievement.

By making every story about their encounters pleasurable, Peter made an effort to work through memory just as one works through the trauma of loss – in this case, his friend’s death. He explores the entire trajectory of his life to find a lasting memory about the meaning of this partnership. While narrating each stage, Peter noticed how his friend refused to be tamed as he grew older and more fragile.

Peter has also written a great deal about others, such as his teacher Jean Craig (Beilharz, 2009) or Keith Tester (Beilharz, 2023), ⁵ but he always returns to Bauman. Certainly, this friendship illustrates what Aristotle describes as philia: the real and most important way that equals love one another. Perhaps one may actually love a friend in ways that romantic love could never compete with. Most of us look for diverse ways to engage with others, forming multiple and unique relationships that, in harmony, fulfill our complex set of human needs. For Peter, Bauman elevated and joined respect, admiration, and commitment into a single relationship. This is why this memoir is so moving and so explicit about making friendship the most important relationship in one’s vital interests. Again, Sartre and De Beauvoir closely mirror this effort.

Their strong bond was deeper because both men were legendary outsiders: Bauman was a Jewish Polish man living in England, while Peter was an Australian (living in the antipodes) ⁶ with German origins. Peter never escaped the shadow cast by the Germans’ legacy and experienced difficulties meeting his relatives in Germany. Both men shared some outsider condition, yet the differences were special because Peter was keenly aware that Bauman kept writing about the meaning of our times after the Holocaust ⁷ and thought of it as a central part of modernity. Peter came to accept his roots once he understood what his friend meant by that and allowed him to process his German ancestry.

Peter ends up connecting Bauman to Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) work Homo Sacer. Agamben extends his views to the whole of modernity and ends up erasing features of it as opaque or insignificant – in my view, a mistake. Neither Bauman nor Peter would endorse that kind of negativity or nihilism; a normative view of better possibilities after disastrous events can be constructed. Yet in Peter’s essay ‘The worlds we create’ (Beilharz, 2006), he connects Bauman’s theory to other figures such as Michel Foucault’s whose views on prison were connected to his idea of modernity, but ultimately, he chooses Agamben’s ‘Lager’ as the central feature of modernity. I think that overwhelming focus on this symbol of violence and death is wrong and misses modern conceptions of authority, democracy, and critique as categories clearly linked to Enlightenment, just as publicity as a right to demand accountability from the state ⁸ was too central for Immanuel Kant. Peter and Agamben do not acknowledge the existence of international law, democratic constitutions, and new ideas about justice, nor the growing consciousness about racism, sexism, gender oppression, and class inequalities. I believe modernity is not only about death but also about life.

It is strange that Peter’s interpretation of Bauman’s achievements is also a way of disentangling himself from his German origin, but it worked out well to keep interpreting his sociological debts and contribute inputs to Bauman’s own work. They cannot separate themselves easily anymore. But I find in Peter’s heritage the door for him to become independent from his friend’s legacy and to move into venues that remain unexplored.

Given my observation of his pessimism about modernity (his views are too sociological here), I do not know anyone more cosmopolitan, open to friendships, and kind than Peter Beilharz. Those characteristics are one of the great reasons that Thesis Eleven and its Centre have enjoyed such success. All of Peter’s friends, well-known sociologists and intellectuals are a testament to his plural and deep interests in life. Certainly, it has been a privilege for me to know him for at least 30 years. Peter has led us not by exhortation, as the last sentence of his memoir claims, but by example, and this might be the reason why Bauman called him ‘Peter the Great’.

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Peter in Italy, 2017